People and communities
Church of Christ: a congregation displaced into a house
Documented history · Sources compared
A minister’s later account traces a congregation from a funeral to a lodge room, a family home and its own meetinghouse.
The funeral brought the preacher back
Writing in the Gospel Advocate in 1944, E. E. Joynes recalled conducting William Cutts’s funeral in the Methodist meetinghouse early in 1914. Listeners asked him to return, and he did so two weeks later. The account makes a family death the occasion for a new local religious gathering. Joynes account, reproduced for the centennial.
A year’s room lasted six months
Joynes said a lodge hall was secured for a year but the group had to leave after six months. Meetings then continued at Charles H. Cutts’s home. He does not explain the dispute, so neither a particular landlord nor religious persecution should be invented. The new meetinghouse opened April 16, 1916. Joynes account.
An earlier voice inside a later publication
The society introduces the page as centennial material from 2001, but the scan itself credits a March 9, 1944 report. Its first-person recollection is valuable evidence with a thirty-year interval between events and publication. Dated attribution on the scan.
Sources and research limits
The scanned text was read directly. Its claim to be New Jersey’s first Church of Christ meetinghouse is not adopted without a statewide comparison.